DESCRIPTION: (Verbatim from the Applicant's Abstract): Heart failure constitutes the most frequent and expensive hospital discharge diagnosis, costing annually over $10 billion with 700,000 hospital admissions, averaging 3.2 admissions totaling 26 days/patient. Factors which increased re-hospitalization rates, include medication noncompliance, insufficient discharge follow up, and failure to seek prompt medical treatment. Proper patient monitoring can stabilize the patient's condition, with intensive home monitoring, re-hospitalization rates can decrease to 1.2 admissions per year, averaging only 6 days annually. While medical surveillance maybe the best approach, current implementation has several problems; it is labor intensive and expensive, and follow-up is often inadequate and incomplete, particularly for patients in the inner city and rural areas. The proposed project enlists interactive technology between the health care provider and the patient at home to allow frequent monitoring of health status, to provide advice on health care, and to educate the patient via a direct data communication system. Thus, the aims of Phase I are: 1) To develop and build a prototype system, which will enable the patient to monitor vital signs and interact with medical providers. 2) To determine if patients with congestive heart failure can interact successfully with a health care providers via this system. PROPOSED COMMERCIAL APPLICATION: Heart failure constitutes the most frequent and expensive hospital discharge diagnosis, costing annually over $10 billion with over 700,000 hospital admissions. As such, this is a huge market. Proper patient monitoring can stabilize the patient's condition, thereby decreasing re-hospitalization rates. While medical surveillance maybe the best approach, current implementation is labor intensive and expensive. Our newly designed system will overcome the limitations of current medical practice. Given the large number of patients with heart failure, the applicability of our technology to other patient groups, and the current interest in the internet in general, the commercial potential is very significant.